She’s a woman, so whatever difficulty you are expecting, double or triple it. Women don’t like cryonics.
She is not particularly religious, but is concerned with leaving as much money for my grandfather (and later my parents and me) as possible.
Yeah, I’d give up here. Signing up is hard, it’s expensive, it’s much too late, there’s a sure-fire competing desire, and the target is female. The odds of success are, at a minimum, <5% (if you actually try, I’d be happy to record a prediction or bet on it). This will not end well for you. Don’t try.
The odds of success are, at a minimum, <5%… Don’t try.
One does not necessarily follow from the other. Don’t expect too much (I would put the odds around 1% myself) but it might still be worth a few hours or days of your time.
A new gambling house sets up in Reno. The owner undertakes to bet with everyone about whether or not he, the owner, will do his laundry tomorrow. Bets are made today and close at 6 PM. (Perhaps gambling houses already operate this way?) Do we, then, expect a rush of clients? The problem with this bet is that he, the owner, has some control over whether or not he does his laundry. Not only are the dice loaded, but he gets to pick, after all bets are laid, which loaded die to use. Computing probabilities only makes sense when the events bet upon are known to be random.
So the cryonicist, Donaldson argues, needs to think more like the owner of the casino in this example instead of like a passive gambler.
This odds-based thinking also tends to encourage passivity, a fault which I find in typical “skeptical” evaluations of the idea. The usual skeptic says something like, “Cryonics can’t or won’t work,” period; whereas the skeptic who likes solving problems looks at the situation and thinks more along the lines of, “Hmm, cryonics can’t or won’t work—if you do it that way.” Then he might try to think of ways to improve the statement of the problem so that it looks more solvable.
You can look at cryonic signup rates by gender, and there’s also the article that advancedatheist linked. I’ll add that in my anecdotal experience, women seem more likely to dismiss the idea when I bring it up in casual conversation.
For myself, personally, I don’t like cryonics because I think the research largely points to it being non-viable. Of the three other women I can remember speaking to recently, two others had the same objection, and the last one’s issue is that they live in Australia so the difficulty of getting cryopreserved soon after death is ridiculously high (they view it as plausible-but-unlikely)
Yeah, I’m wondering if plastination might catch on better. Most people I talk to are on board with the “death is bad” philosophy, but cryonics is just too much of a long shot.
Is there a large contingent of people who want to sign up for cryonics but are worried about the strict temperature requirements and so forth? If not, plastination probably won’t catch on much better than cryonics.
With cryonics, if somebody messes up at any point (the cryonics company goes broke, the LN2 production company experiences unexpected problems and any local stores are running low, an employee mishandles your body, etc.) then you are unlikely to be revived. With plastination, there’s a lot less that can go wrong; even if the future caretakers of your brain don’t believe it will work, it is more effort to destroy your brain than to leave it be. They may decide to bury it in a graveyard, but that’s less likely to prevent revival than thawing from cryonics.
In either case, the probability that revival will be technologically and socially possible given it’s physically possible approaches 1 as time approaches infinity, and the probability that something bad and irreversible happens to you given that you aren’t revived also approaches 1 as time approaches infinity. In either case, you’re betting that the former happens before the latter. However, this seems a much better bet with plastination than cryonics because it’s a lot harder for something bad to happen to you.
It may catch a bit better because cryonics is very sci-fi sounding. There are a lot of sci-fi novels and movies using cryonics, and for many, those who believe in cryonics are just those who take sci-fi for reality. Plastination isn’t used in sci-fi, it’s something that most people just never heared about, so they don’t have “it’s just sci-fi” prior belief.
Also, cryonics are very expensive because of the high upkeep required to keep the temperature, so there is good hope that plastination could be made much cheaper, lowering the entrance barrier.
Also, cryonics are very expensive because of the high upkeep required to keep the temperature, so there is good hope that plastination could be made much cheaper, lowering the entrance barrier.
My understanding from reading Darwin and various other materials is that the ongoing maintenance cost of LN2 (one of the cheapest fluids around) storage is pretty low, and the major cost in cryopreservation are the original procedures.
One public image advantage of plastination is that, if you’re doing it on whole bodies, you could (Plausibly) put the plastinated patient on a standard bed (Maybe in a 2001-esque pod for extra effect (No, no need to mention Robert Nelson pulled the same stunt)) and make it look closer to real medicine. Though I’m not sure it’s completely prudent to let a plastinated body out in the open collecting dust for show.
I’ve wondered if we do make a transition to a society where extreme healthy life extension becomes feasible and a part of mainstream medicine whether we’ll see a pattern where women on average still choose to die more or less on schedule while men on average choose the longevity treatments. That could work out well for the straight alpha males and the alpha wannabes who value women for sex but not much else, because they would always have new crops of women coming to fruition for their sexual adventures while they forget the dying older ones; but the situation could distress the men who become emotionally involved with the women in their lives, value their companionship and don’t want to see these women age and die.
I’ve noticed that the relatively few women who sign up for cryonics on their own initiative generally don’t have, and apparently don’t want, children, though I know of a couple of fertility-oriented mom types. One of these motherhood-averse women told me that well before she discovered cryonics and sought out male cryonicists as companions, she had a tubal ligation in her early 20′s. (She had a scar in the right place.)
But for the most part the cryonics movement remains a male-dominated social space, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive, with no change in opinion for preserving my OH, and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood.
I’m not sure for what proportion of women the thought process goes “The future wouldn’t want me (because I won’t be able to make babies)”, with the part in brackets powering the rationalisation-hamster.
Fortunately I learned to spot rationalisation from instinct a while back, but I’m still not sure what I can do, if anything, to correct for the shift.
Would you say you’re basically shifting into a mindset where your future babies are more important than you are? Like the proverbial friendly AI which values its own existence, not because that’s a terminal value, but because that’s an instrumental value—it can’t do good if it doesn’t still exist.
My hamster (human instinct) very definitely is. The rational me shouldn’t be: I know I’m more than my reproductive organs! The problem is, on issues like this hamster is pretty loud, and it’s not obvious on an intuitive level that “hamster terminal values” are actually “me-instrumental values” (since my life is not about placating hamster, but placating hamster helps me be happy and productive)!
I’m suspecting that most people don’t have this kind of grasp on their hamster-minds though, and female hamsters are pretty destructive on these issues.
To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood...Fortunately I learned to spot rationalisation from instinct a while back, but I’m still not sure what I can do, if anything, to correct for the shift.
Are you aware that eggs can be frozen? Given how many women hit their 40s and discover they cannot bear children, the cost-benefit analysis might be interesting to do.
“Whether you are aware of your incessantly ticking biological clock or not, the absolute last thing that any woman of steadily advancing childbearing age wants to hear when she flips on the morning news shows is: Women lose 90 percent of their eggs by age 30.
Using a mathematical model and data from 325 women, the researchers found that the average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs and steadily loses them as she ages, with just 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40.
Also, as another data point, it is possible that the recent change in your “will to parent” might reverse polarity again once you hit your late twenties and early thirties. I’ve been amazed at this change that has sort of crept up on me over the last few years—from wanting “at least three” in my early to mid twenties to finding the whole enterprise rather frightening (in terms of lifestyle changes and sacrifices needing to be made). It’s possible I’m completely atypical since there are no shortage of stories of women in their thirties becoming even more desperate for children.
For a 30-yo? No; I’m afraid I just understand the fertility curve looks something like an inverted U centered around the late teens. If I had to guess, I think the infertility rate is something like a quarter or fifth by the 40s so maybe half that or less for 30?
This is something you should really research yourself. On the plus side, if you keep notes and you write up your final cost-benefit calculation and actual decision, it’d make a good Article or Discussion post.
To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive, with no change in opinion for preserving my OH, and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood.
As the aforementioned OH, I’m wondering if “quizzical” counts as a normal reaction to reading this.
Thank you for the link! Note that the .pdf version of the article (which is also referenced in dbaupp’s link) has a record of the “hostile-wife” cases over a span of 8 years.
whether we’ll see a pattern where women on average still choose to die more or less on schedule while men on average choose the longevity treatments
Mainstream society thinks it’s normal for everyone to want to stay young for as long as possible. Women spend billions on preserving youth and beauty—no aversion to “extreme healthy life extension” there.
Like “statistically.” The language a person uses affects their view of what they’re speaking about, and I suspect that not adding qualifiers when taking about things most members of a faction do causes one to notice/believe in atypical cases less.
Yes! Exactly what I’m talking about. Such concerns have been raised here before, y’know. But it’s also that, well, a newcomer unfamilliar with LW thought patterns might take offense.
Likewise, it seems a large generalisation, and other facts about the person in question seem more relevant (e.g. age, educational background, financial situation.)
other facts about the person in question seem more relevant (e.g. age, educational background, financial situation.)
Really? Just knowing we are discussing a female instantly lets you chop the base rate down to something like a third or fourth or maybe less. That’s pretty impressive to me, and I don’t actually know that any of those factors are better predictors.
(Nor, I strongly suspect, do you, even though you want to think that it’s a large generalization and not a useful one.)
The most obvious other factor I was thinking of was age. My mental model of an average 20 year old of any gender is far more likely to be open to cryonics than a 50+ year old. I would think there would be massive cultural diffferences in feelings about death, religion, speculative technology, etc. that would massively shift their likely evaluation of cryonics. [But I confess I haven’t looked into data on this.]
Age is also more useful as it gives you more categories than (standard) gender, subdividing by decade say gives you 5+ categories in the adult population not 2(ish).
I will acknowledge that the phrasing of your original comment “women don’t like cryonics” caused it to stand out more to me than it otherwise would, so I began to critically consider it. But I still think my comments about other factors are valid.
A 20 year old is also much more likely to not worry about death, and be unable to spare a thousand bucks a year or so. As well, modern 20 year olds come from an era where cryonics is a joke they see on TV (Futurama), and not a real possibility like it was for people at the start in the ’60s or ’70s.
If your age inference is right, shouldn’t we see a lot of young people in cryonics? But recall that one of Eliezer’s cryonics was about a cryonics conference aimed at recruiting young people; not the sort of thing you do if you’re reaching them very well… This also lines up nicely with my previous post about the increasing cost of cryonics due to ending grandfathering: it was previously supportable because cryonics was growing, but now...?
gives you more categories than (standard) gender, subdividing by decade say gives you 5+ categories in the adult population not 2(ish).
It also means your inferences are less reliable because your total n is being split over 5+ groups and not just 2.
I’m a little surprised that this didn’t turn into a Pascal’s Mugging calculation if we’re balancing an unpleasant relationship right before death against not-death. Would people set a higher odds of success cutoff for starting a cryonics argument than they would for an extension of life treatment?
Is this because cryonics is more stigmatized while aggressive intervention to extend life is generally viewed by the mainstream as praiseworthy?
Would people set a higher odds of success cutoff for starting a cryonics argument than they would for an extension of life treatment?
I would. Advocating cryonics, a known minority belief, has the chance to blowback and make you look like an ambulance-chaser or worse. Even if the dying person would calculate that cryonics is +EV for them, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for someone else to try to intervene and get them to sign up (unless that other person is perfectly altruistic and doesn’t mind the possible negatives they might suffer).
Advocating some horribly painful low-value—yet medically approved—treatment or heroic measure, on the other hand, has no downsides for you.
She’s a woman, so whatever difficulty you are expecting, double or triple it. Women don’t like cryonics.
Yeah, I’d give up here. Signing up is hard, it’s expensive, it’s much too late, there’s a sure-fire competing desire, and the target is female. The odds of success are, at a minimum, <5% (if you actually try, I’d be happy to record a prediction or bet on it). This will not end well for you. Don’t try.
One does not necessarily follow from the other. Don’t expect too much (I would put the odds around 1% myself) but it might still be worth a few hours or days of your time.
These odds depend a great deal on the behavior of cryonicists in the here and now, instead of depending completely on the haphazard. Refer to:
RESPONSIBILITY, PROBABILITY, AND DURABILITY, by Thomas Donaldson http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/probability.html
Specifically Donaldson writes:
So the cryonicist, Donaldson argues, needs to think more like the owner of the casino in this example instead of like a passive gambler.
This odds-based thinking also tends to encourage passivity, a fault which I find in typical “skeptical” evaluations of the idea. The usual skeptic says something like, “Cryonics can’t or won’t work,” period; whereas the skeptic who likes solving problems looks at the situation and thinks more along the lines of, “Hmm, cryonics can’t or won’t work—if you do it that way.” Then he might try to think of ways to improve the statement of the problem so that it looks more solvable.
I read gwern and faul_sname as talking about the odds of convincing a relative to sign up, not the odds of revival.
Yes. Unfortunately, freezing is the only option as of right now, and it seems to require that a lot of things go right.
What made you believe this? Is there a pattern to the declared reasons?
You can look at cryonic signup rates by gender, and there’s also the article that advancedatheist linked. I’ll add that in my anecdotal experience, women seem more likely to dismiss the idea when I bring it up in casual conversation.
For myself, personally, I don’t like cryonics because I think the research largely points to it being non-viable. Of the three other women I can remember speaking to recently, two others had the same objection, and the last one’s issue is that they live in Australia so the difficulty of getting cryopreserved soon after death is ridiculously high (they view it as plausible-but-unlikely)
Yeah, I’m wondering if plastination might catch on better. Most people I talk to are on board with the “death is bad” philosophy, but cryonics is just too much of a long shot.
Is there a large contingent of people who want to sign up for cryonics but are worried about the strict temperature requirements and so forth? If not, plastination probably won’t catch on much better than cryonics.
With cryonics, if somebody messes up at any point (the cryonics company goes broke, the LN2 production company experiences unexpected problems and any local stores are running low, an employee mishandles your body, etc.) then you are unlikely to be revived. With plastination, there’s a lot less that can go wrong; even if the future caretakers of your brain don’t believe it will work, it is more effort to destroy your brain than to leave it be. They may decide to bury it in a graveyard, but that’s less likely to prevent revival than thawing from cryonics.
In either case, the probability that revival will be technologically and socially possible given it’s physically possible approaches 1 as time approaches infinity, and the probability that something bad and irreversible happens to you given that you aren’t revived also approaches 1 as time approaches infinity. In either case, you’re betting that the former happens before the latter. However, this seems a much better bet with plastination than cryonics because it’s a lot harder for something bad to happen to you.
It may catch a bit better because cryonics is very sci-fi sounding. There are a lot of sci-fi novels and movies using cryonics, and for many, those who believe in cryonics are just those who take sci-fi for reality. Plastination isn’t used in sci-fi, it’s something that most people just never heared about, so they don’t have “it’s just sci-fi” prior belief.
Also, cryonics are very expensive because of the high upkeep required to keep the temperature, so there is good hope that plastination could be made much cheaper, lowering the entrance barrier.
My understanding from reading Darwin and various other materials is that the ongoing maintenance cost of LN2 (one of the cheapest fluids around) storage is pretty low, and the major cost in cryopreservation are the original procedures.
One public image advantage of plastination is that, if you’re doing it on whole bodies, you could (Plausibly) put the plastinated patient on a standard bed (Maybe in a 2001-esque pod for extra effect (No, no need to mention Robert Nelson pulled the same stunt)) and make it look closer to real medicine. Though I’m not sure it’s completely prudent to let a plastinated body out in the open collecting dust for show.
I guess you missed the controversy this article generated a couple years back:
http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/is-that-what-love-is-the-hostile-wife-phenomenon-in-cryonics/
I’ve wondered if we do make a transition to a society where extreme healthy life extension becomes feasible and a part of mainstream medicine whether we’ll see a pattern where women on average still choose to die more or less on schedule while men on average choose the longevity treatments. That could work out well for the straight alpha males and the alpha wannabes who value women for sex but not much else, because they would always have new crops of women coming to fruition for their sexual adventures while they forget the dying older ones; but the situation could distress the men who become emotionally involved with the women in their lives, value their companionship and don’t want to see these women age and die.
I’ve noticed that the relatively few women who sign up for cryonics on their own initiative generally don’t have, and apparently don’t want, children, though I know of a couple of fertility-oriented mom types. One of these motherhood-averse women told me that well before she discovered cryonics and sought out male cryonicists as companions, she had a tubal ligation in her early 20′s. (She had a scar in the right place.)
But for the most part the cryonics movement remains a male-dominated social space, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive, with no change in opinion for preserving my OH, and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood.
I’m not sure for what proportion of women the thought process goes “The future wouldn’t want me (because I won’t be able to make babies)”, with the part in brackets powering the rationalisation-hamster.
Fortunately I learned to spot rationalisation from instinct a while back, but I’m still not sure what I can do, if anything, to correct for the shift.
Would you say you’re basically shifting into a mindset where your future babies are more important than you are? Like the proverbial friendly AI which values its own existence, not because that’s a terminal value, but because that’s an instrumental value—it can’t do good if it doesn’t still exist.
My hamster (human instinct) very definitely is. The rational me shouldn’t be: I know I’m more than my reproductive organs! The problem is, on issues like this hamster is pretty loud, and it’s not obvious on an intuitive level that “hamster terminal values” are actually “me-instrumental values” (since my life is not about placating hamster, but placating hamster helps me be happy and productive)!
I’m suspecting that most people don’t have this kind of grasp on their hamster-minds though, and female hamsters are pretty destructive on these issues.
Are you aware that eggs can be frozen? Given how many women hit their 40s and discover they cannot bear children, the cost-benefit analysis might be interesting to do.
Thanks for the advice. Do you have an idea of the probabilities for a 30-yo? I’m highly unlikely to wait any longer due to said fertility concerns.
There was this article from a couple of years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/22/AR2010022203639.html
Also, as another data point, it is possible that the recent change in your “will to parent” might reverse polarity again once you hit your late twenties and early thirties. I’ve been amazed at this change that has sort of crept up on me over the last few years—from wanting “at least three” in my early to mid twenties to finding the whole enterprise rather frightening (in terms of lifestyle changes and sacrifices needing to be made). It’s possible I’m completely atypical since there are no shortage of stories of women in their thirties becoming even more desperate for children.
Is losing eggs an issue if there isn’t a quality decrease? I mean, I only need one at a time...
Thanks for the info though :)
For a 30-yo? No; I’m afraid I just understand the fertility curve looks something like an inverted U centered around the late teens. If I had to guess, I think the infertility rate is something like a quarter or fifth by the 40s so maybe half that or less for 30?
This is something you should really research yourself. On the plus side, if you keep notes and you write up your final cost-benefit calculation and actual decision, it’d make a good Article or Discussion post.
As the aforementioned OH, I’m wondering if “quizzical” counts as a normal reaction to reading this.
I have definitely told you about this.
Yes. (It was intended as humour, but apparently that wasn’t clear)
Thank you for the link! Note that the .pdf version of the article (which is also referenced in dbaupp’s link) has a record of the “hostile-wife” cases over a span of 8 years.
Mainstream society thinks it’s normal for everyone to want to stay young for as long as possible. Women spend billions on preserving youth and beauty—no aversion to “extreme healthy life extension” there.
Somewhat off topic, but still interesting (to me):
Why do you mention the scar? Should we have a high prior that women in this situation would lie about having had a tubal ligation?
I think it’s an empirical belief, e.g. even Robyn Hanson’s wife is resistant to cryonics.
The second sentence of your comment is missing a qualifier of some sort.
Like “statistically.” The language a person uses affects their view of what they’re speaking about, and I suspect that not adding qualifiers when taking about things most members of a faction do causes one to notice/believe in atypical cases less.
Yes! Exactly what I’m talking about. Such concerns have been raised here before, y’know. But it’s also that, well, a newcomer unfamilliar with LW thought patterns might take offense.
Seeing as there was a thriving thread about eating human babies a few months ago, that wasn’t really on my list of concerns.
Misogyny is Near, Babyeaters are Far.
Heck, I’ve been here quite a while and it still rubbed me the wrong way.
Likewise, it seems a large generalisation, and other facts about the person in question seem more relevant (e.g. age, educational background, financial situation.)
Really? Just knowing we are discussing a female instantly lets you chop the base rate down to something like a third or fourth or maybe less. That’s pretty impressive to me, and I don’t actually know that any of those factors are better predictors.
(Nor, I strongly suspect, do you, even though you want to think that it’s a large generalization and not a useful one.)
The most obvious other factor I was thinking of was age. My mental model of an average 20 year old of any gender is far more likely to be open to cryonics than a 50+ year old. I would think there would be massive cultural diffferences in feelings about death, religion, speculative technology, etc. that would massively shift their likely evaluation of cryonics. [But I confess I haven’t looked into data on this.]
Age is also more useful as it gives you more categories than (standard) gender, subdividing by decade say gives you 5+ categories in the adult population not 2(ish).
I will acknowledge that the phrasing of your original comment “women don’t like cryonics” caused it to stand out more to me than it otherwise would, so I began to critically consider it. But I still think my comments about other factors are valid.
A 20 year old is also much more likely to not worry about death, and be unable to spare a thousand bucks a year or so. As well, modern 20 year olds come from an era where cryonics is a joke they see on TV (Futurama), and not a real possibility like it was for people at the start in the ’60s or ’70s.
If your age inference is right, shouldn’t we see a lot of young people in cryonics? But recall that one of Eliezer’s cryonics was about a cryonics conference aimed at recruiting young people; not the sort of thing you do if you’re reaching them very well… This also lines up nicely with my previous post about the increasing cost of cryonics due to ending grandfathering: it was previously supportable because cryonics was growing, but now...?
It also means your inferences are less reliable because your total n is being split over 5+ groups and not just 2.
I’m a little surprised that this didn’t turn into a Pascal’s Mugging calculation if we’re balancing an unpleasant relationship right before death against not-death. Would people set a higher odds of success cutoff for starting a cryonics argument than they would for an extension of life treatment?
Is this because cryonics is more stigmatized while aggressive intervention to extend life is generally viewed by the mainstream as praiseworthy?
I would. Advocating cryonics, a known minority belief, has the chance to blowback and make you look like an ambulance-chaser or worse. Even if the dying person would calculate that cryonics is +EV for them, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for someone else to try to intervene and get them to sign up (unless that other person is perfectly altruistic and doesn’t mind the possible negatives they might suffer).
Advocating some horribly painful low-value—yet medically approved—treatment or heroic measure, on the other hand, has no downsides for you.